Mithilesh Kumar Jha, Language Politics and Public Sphere in North India: Making of the Maithili Movement

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-176
Author(s):  
Avanti Chhatre
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
North India ◽  
Language Politics

Language Politics and Public Sphere in North India

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mithilesh Kumar Jha
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
National Language ◽  
North India ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Double Movement ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
The Masses

Moving beyond the existing scholarship on language politics in north India which implicitly or explicitly focuses on Hindi–Urdu debates, this book examines the formation of the Maithili movement in the context of expansion of Hindi as the ‘national’ language. For a long time, the Hindi–Urdu debate has provided an important source to critically asses various facets of the nationalist movement in north India. But much emphasis on this debate has undermined simultaneous developments taking place in ‘minor’ linguistic spheres within the ‘Hindi heartland’ like Maithili, Braj, Awadhi, and Bhojpuri. This work also revisits the dynamic hierarchy through which a distinction is produced between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ languages. Significance of these ‘minor’ linguistic movements lies in the ways through which they resist such domination and appropriations while asserting their own independence. Throughout the history of the Maithili movement, what one finds is not just an opposition to Hindi’s claim of Maithili being its ‘dialect’ or the ambivalent relationship between the two. But more appropriately, one can see a double movement. The authority of Hindi has strengthened within the Maithili-speaking region even when the movement for the recognition of Maithili as an independent language has become more assertive. Another paradox of the Maithili movement has been its increasing politicization—from Hindi–Maithili ambiguities and antagonisms to territorial consciousness and finally demands for a separate statehood of Mithila, along with the persistent indifferent attitude of the masses. This work examines these processes historically since the middle of the nineteenth century until the inclusion of Maithili into the eighth schedule of the Indian Constitution in 2004.

Language Politics in the Comparative Media Crucible

2021 ◽  
pp. 118-151
Author(s):  
Akshaya Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Electronic Media ◽  
Trojan Horse ◽  
North India ◽  
The Political ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Northern Plains ◽  
Comparative Media ◽  
Linguistic Communities

This chapter recounts the language politics of north India, with particular stress upon the heydays of Hindi nationalism, which wrested control of literary production from Urdu on behalf of the ‘Hindis’ of northern plains. Bhojpuri among other ‘tongues’ were therefore side-lined by the nationalist fervour. Tracing the trajectory of women’s folksongs, popular chapbooks and theatre troupes, the chapter reconstructs the resurgence of the vernaculars via audiocassettes, VCDs/DVDs and microSD cards. Electronic media thus absorbed the energies pushed out of the literate public sphere. The chapter also highlights the role played by a lateral-ness of address to unspool Bhojpuri from its ‘folk’ bearings and mount a mass address upon it. At the end, the chapter places the language politics of north India in relation to the Trojan horse of English, and the attendant struggle for the political existence of the vernacular linguistic communities.

scholarly journals Songs between cities: listening to courtesans in colonial north India

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 591-610 ◽  
Author(s):  
RICHARD DAVID WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
North India ◽  
Language Politics ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Colonial Society ◽  
Musical Skills ◽  
Female Singers

AbstractIn the aftermath of 1857, urban spaces and cultural practices were transformed and contested. Regional royal capitals became nodes in a new colonial geography, and the earlier regimes that had built them were recast as decadent and corrupt societies. Demolitions and new infrastructures aside, this transformation was also felt at the level of manners, sexual mores, language politics, and the performing arts. This article explores this transformation with a focus on women's language, female singers and dancers, and the men who continued to value their literary and musical skills. While dancing girls and courtesans were degraded by policy-makers and vernacular journalists alike, their Urdu compositions continued to be circulated, published, and discussed. Collections of women's biographies and lyrics gesture to the importance of embodied practices in cultivating emotional positions. This cultivation was valued in late Mughal elite society, and continued to resonate for emotional communities of connoisseurs, listeners, and readers, even as they navigated the expectations and sensibilities of colonial society.

scholarly journals ‘Innocent’ Victims/‘Guilty’ Migrants: Hindi public sphere, caste and indentured women in colonial North India

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1674-1674
Author(s):  
CHARU GUPTA
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Folk Songs ◽  
North India

In this article footnote 70 on page 20 should include the following: ‘Quoted in Ashutosh Kumar, “Anti-Indenture Bhojpuri Folk Songs and Poems from North India”, Man in India, 93 (4), 2013, p. 512 [509–19].’On the same page, after the line ‘The victimized woman was glorified and acquired subjecthood only when she emulated the virtues and ideals of upper-caste Indian womanhood and wifely devotion, thereby overcoming the perceived stereotypes of Dalit woman’ the following footnote should have appeared: ‘Kumar, “Anti-Indenture Bhojpuri Folk Songs”, p. 513’.The author regrets the error.

Hindi Dalit Autobiography: an Exploration of Identity

2007 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH BETH
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
North India ◽  
The Public ◽  
Class Status ◽  
Younger Generation ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Bahujan Samaj Party

Several powerful constructions of Dalit social and political identity are now circulating in very influential ways within the public sphere in North India, as various groups including both the Bahujan Samaj Party as well as Hindutva organisations compete to assert their influence over how these identities are defined, who they include, and what they mean. In this context, the rise of Hindi Dalit autobiographies as a source of Dalit cultural identity becomes especially important in North India, as they contest traditional conceptions of the Dalit community as ‘untouchables’ and attempt to re-inscribe Dalit identity in positive, self-assertive terms. However, Dalit autobiographies retain certain ambivalences, as the authors struggle to reconcile their low-caste identity with their current urban middle-class status, and more recently, as their claims to represent all members of the Dalit community are challenged by Dalits of the younger generation.

‘Hindu Communism’: Satyabhakta, apocalypses and utopian Ram Rajya

2021 ◽  
pp. 001946462199787
Author(s):  
Charu Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
First Generation ◽  
North India ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
The North ◽  
Way Of Thinking

In the north India of 1920s–30s, many first-generation anticolonial communists and Left intellectuals did not see any contradiction in reliance upon religion, ethical traditions and morality in a search for vocabularies of dignity, equality, just polity and social liberation. Through select writings in Hindi of Satyabhakta (1897–85), an almost forgotten figure in histories of communism in India, this article focuses on the entanglement between religion and communism as a way of thinking about the Left in India, and the problems and possibilities of such imaginings. Steeped in a north Indian Hindi literary print public sphere, such figures illuminated a distinctly Hindu and Indian path towards communism, making it more relatable to a Hindi–Hindu audience. The article draws attention to Satyabhakta’s layered engagements with utopian political desires, which, in envisaging an egalitarian future, wove Hindu faith-based ethical morality, apocalyptic predictions and notions of a romantic Ram Rajya, with decolonisation, anti-capitalism and aesthetic communist visions of equality. Even while precarious and problematic, such imaginations underline hidden plural histories of communism and, at the same time, trouble atheist, secular communists as well as the proponents of Hindutva.

Putting the Public House of Madīnah on the Muslim Map

2020 ◽  
pp. 24-56
Author(s):  
Megan Eaton Robb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Small Town ◽  
North India ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public House ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter traces a network of regionally, nationally, and locally significant publications, with Madinah newspaper at its center. The threads of this newspaper publication are placed in context with periodicals, associations, and publishing houses to make clear newspapers’ contribution to the delineation of an Urdu public sphere in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Qasbahs not only contributed to the deeper penetration of the public sphere in North India but also influenced the path and formation of that fragmented public. In an age of urbanization where the qasbah, or Islamicate small town, has been overlooked as critical to the construction of Muslim identity, this chapter highlights the language and visual culture of these ancestral towns as influential in the development of a Muslim public in th), ^#e early twentieth century through print publishing.

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